City of Thieves
On sale
15th October 2009
Price: £9.99
‘AN EXCEPTIONAL STORYTELLER’ Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner
‘Ingenious’
New York Times Book Review
‘Compelling’
Daily Telegraph
‘Fast-moving’
Spectator
‘Cinematic’
Marie Claire
‘Gripping’
New York Magazine
From the co-creator and writer of the award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.
Four months into the siege of Leningrad, the city is starving. Seventeen-year-old Lev fears for his life when he is arrested for looting the body of a dead German paratrooper, while his charismatic cellmate, Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested for desertion, seems bizarrely unafraid.
Dawn brings, instead of an execution squad, an impossible challenge. Lev and Kolya can find a dozen eggs for an NKVD colonel to use for his daughter’s wedding cake, and live. Or fail, and die.
In the depths of the coldest winter in history, through a city cut off from all supplies and suffering appalling deprivation, man and boy embark on an absurd hunt. Their search will take them through desolate, lawless Leningrad and the devastated countryside surrounding it, in the captivating journey of two men trying to survive against desperate odds.
PRAISE FOR DAVID BENIOFF
‘Master of the zippy, punchy, knee-to-the-groin story’
Independent on Sunday
‘An ace storyteller’
Entertainment Weekly
‘A skilled creator’
Daily Telegraph
‘Ingenious’
New York Times Book Review
‘Compelling’
Daily Telegraph
‘Fast-moving’
Spectator
‘Cinematic’
Marie Claire
‘Gripping’
New York Magazine
From the co-creator and writer of the award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.
Four months into the siege of Leningrad, the city is starving. Seventeen-year-old Lev fears for his life when he is arrested for looting the body of a dead German paratrooper, while his charismatic cellmate, Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested for desertion, seems bizarrely unafraid.
Dawn brings, instead of an execution squad, an impossible challenge. Lev and Kolya can find a dozen eggs for an NKVD colonel to use for his daughter’s wedding cake, and live. Or fail, and die.
In the depths of the coldest winter in history, through a city cut off from all supplies and suffering appalling deprivation, man and boy embark on an absurd hunt. Their search will take them through desolate, lawless Leningrad and the devastated countryside surrounding it, in the captivating journey of two men trying to survive against desperate odds.
PRAISE FOR DAVID BENIOFF
‘Master of the zippy, punchy, knee-to-the-groin story’
Independent on Sunday
‘An ace storyteller’
Entertainment Weekly
‘A skilled creator’
Daily Telegraph
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Reviews
David Benioff is an exceptional storyteller. With humor, heart, and at times relentless suspense, he has written a riveting war novel and an engaging coming of age story. City of Thieves is tender, illuminating, and, be warned, often shocking. It is the kind of compellingly readable book that lingers long after it is read
Benioff is a skilled creator of atmospheres . . . Told with compelling power
The latest master of the zippy, punchy, knee-to-the-groin story is David Benioff
A fast-moving adventure story . . . it had me gripped
Ingenious . . . The research never stands out because Benioff weaves it in so deftly. He shifts tone with perfect control -- no recent novel I've read travels so quickly and surely between registers, from humour to devastation
Expert tone . . . fine sense of pace
A hard-to-put-down novel . . . Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser
This spellbinding story perfectly blends tragedy and comedy
A high-spirited adventure
Beautifully paced and seemingly effortless
Splendid . . . Benioff has produced a funny, sad, and thrilling novel
David Benioff's glorious second novel is a wild action-packed quest and much else besides: a coming-of-age story, an odd-couple tale and a juicy footnote to the siege of Leningrad . . . This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along
A master storyteller . . . Benioff's inventiveness carries you along with no pause for breath . . . A testament of towering imagination
A zipping and unexpectedly amusing read . . . Gifted with the touch of a fairy-story teller himself, Benioff manages to combine a sense of dark realism with entertaining brio
A cinematic tale of a scared boy and a nonchalant man traversing the famished, snow-bound city of Leningrad in search of 12 eggs for a wedding cake . . . it's the pair's jaunty argumentative friendship that gives this novel such heart
Pacy, but with more depth than that suggests
A modern masterpiece, both heart-stopping and heartbreaking . . . a shatteringly beautiful and brilliant work. And on rare occasions we're handed a gift of a novel that's so filled with truth it has the power to change the way we look at the world. City of Thieves is one of them
A rough-and-tumble tale that clenches humour, savagery, and pathos squarely together on the same page
It's beautifully written and acutely observed and I defy you to put it down
Benioff peppers his swift-moving plot with pitch-dark humor and unexpected turns. It's a rousing reading experience, to cackle aloud at one paragraph then gasp at the next . . . I'm glad I waited until warm weather to start this winter's tale. But really, any other time would have been just fine. There's no bad season to read a book this good
Benioff blends humour and horror expertly
A deft storyteller, Benioff writes about starvation, cannibalism, and Nazi atrocities with poise and cinematic flair. If Thieves were a movie, it would start out like Schindler's List and end up like Raiders of the Lost Ark
David Benioff's second novel features a snappy plot, a buoyant friendship, a quirky courtship, an assortment of menacing bad guys, an atmosphere that flickers between grainy realism and fairy-tale grotesquery and a grim but irrepressible sense of humour. Really, everything a reader could hope for in a buddy story set during the German army's siege of Leningrad during World War II
A gripping, at times gory, but ultimately sweet story . . . It has the phenomenal twists of, yes, a great movie
Finely honed
Benioff's buddy story is hotwired with a breakneck plot that hurtles along at rabid intensity